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SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, has backed off a widely unpopular, end-of-January decision that had banned entire countries from accessing the site's vast assortment of open-source software projects. In a blog post yesterday, SourceForge announced that it would discontinue its blanket ban, which was done using automatic IP blocking.

The new policy puts the responsibility for restricting access to certain projects in the hands of project administrators.

Facebook just announced that it has become a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. According to Facebook's David Recordon, the company wants to give back to the open-source community that allowed Facebook to develop, and contribute to projects like the Thrift framework, Hive, memcached and Cassandra. Apache Gold members donate $40,000 per year to the project. It's worth noting that this is not Apache's highest sponsorship level. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are platinum sponsors and give $100,000 per year.

Dell has just released a customized version of Chromium OS, the open source code behind Google's new operating system called Chrome, in a build designed specifically for Dell Mini computers. According to a blog post on the Dell Community site, several company employees were inspired create this custom version after seeing Engadget's video showing Chrome OS running on a Vostro A860 netbook. After tinkering around with the code, they were able to create their own version of Chromium OS, complete with functional Wi-Fi drivers, and have made the build available for download as a USB key image file from the Direct2Dell blog.

Google just released a new open source programming language called Go. Go is intended to offer built-in support for concurrent processes, make the most of modern hardware and deliver a super-fast coding experience. Google says in its announcement that "Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++." Go was created by a five person team that includes UNIX co-creators Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

It's not for everyone, but we talked to a variety of developers who are looking forward to kicking the tires. Below are opinions before launch from three developers we have a lot of respect for. Two are enthusiastic and one is skeptical.

Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic is open sourcing After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.

Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."

Following weeks of requests from open-source developers, HTC has released the Hero Android source code on their developer site.

In response to the mobile devs, HTC has previously stated it was waiting for its own developers to provide the source before releasing it publicly. As late as last week, HTC representatives had emailed developers saying, "At the moment we do not know when the kernel source for the Hero will be released," and "We are still pushing our developers to provide us with the source code and for the links to be added." Since the Android kernel is licensed under the GPL, this delay was creating both dissatisfaction and controversy in the community.

Earlier this week Microsoft announced the release of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code is meant to enhance Linux performance when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or R2 Hyper-V. Essentially it is aimed at server resource efficiency and reducing the costs associated with managing a company's IT infrastructure. Nevertheless, as revealed by Vyatta engineer Stephen Hemminger, the release may have been a legal requirement as Microsoft's code was originally in violation of the GNU General Public License.

More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology. Announced earlier at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, groups such as Google, RedHat, Novell, Linux, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation have teamed up to create Open Source For America. The joint effort is a coalition aimed at lobbying the US Federal government to consider using open-source software over proprietary code. O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly and Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin are just some of the board advisors.

To most people, the term "open source" immediately conjures an image of two geeks sitting in a dark room (probably a basement) -- curtains drawn, McDonald's remains strewn across the desk, and 42 oz sodas within arms' reach -- coding away at their computers, listening to Linkin Park or a game soundtrack. People automatically associate it with endless lines of code, back-end technology, server rooms, computer science labs, and experimental (read: unsafe and buggy) technology.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

When the open source convention OSCON decided to move from Portland, Oregon to San Jose last year, the open source citizens of Portland set about developing their very own "conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way". And since Portland is a hub of the open source community, an army of volunteers and organizers were able to put together a three day conference called Open Source Bridge. With its focus on open source citizenship, its innovative track structure for sessions, an all-night hacker lounge and peer-produced conference software, Open Source Bridge was not only a success, but plans are already underway for next year's conference.

More and more web developers are earning their mobile wings. Mountain View-based Appcelerator just announced their beta release of Titanium Mobile - an open source, open standards tool that lets developers build applications with native UI elements, code compilation, device storage and geo-location APIs on both the iPhone and Android.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

Vancouver, BC's city government posted an agenda for next week's council meeting that outlines its interest in adopting open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources. Vancouver hopes this new policy will help create new opportunities for its city, recently named "Best City Archive of the World".

You can keep your fusty old venture capital. For our money, you can't beat the Tamagochi-eqsue cuteness of Miro's Code Adoption Program.

Miro is the free, open source, cross-platform online video player that manages queued downloads much like TiVo for the Internet. And although the number of users has tripled to about 1.1 million uniques over the past three months with the release of Miro 2.0, the amount of funds available for nonprofits such as Miro has dramatically dropped. Insert yet another generalization about the crumbling economy here.

While Matt Mullenweg was in France for WordCamp Paris 2009, the team from ReadWriteWeb France took the opportunity to catch up with him and ask him a few questions about open source, WordPress, and the future.

One of the great things about the web today is that you can choose from hundreds of services that will host your blogs, lifestreams, photos, videos, and music. One disadvantage of this, however, is that you typically have very little control over the actual experience. You can't, for example, make changes to themes on Wordpress.com or customize the way your pictures are shown on Flickr. However, thanks to a large number of open source projects, you could do all of this if you hosted your own blog, photo gallery, or mixtape service. In this post, we will show you how to do that and which services we like to run on our own domains.

When your company owns the biggest open source code repository online, the most venerable geek news aggregator there is and many geeks' favorite place to shop for wacky stuff - what do you do next? Hopefully we're about to find out, because the owners of SourceForge, SlashDot and ThinkGeek are apparently working on a new project.

One of the most interesting ways to get an idea where companies of interest are headed is by watching who they hire. That's one of the reasons why we launched Jobwire, our site tracking who gets hired in tech and new media. SourceForge, also the name of SourceForge and Slashdot's parent company, has made a couple of interesting hires lately.

The EU-funded OpenKnowledge program is a smart toolkit designed to unlock the hidden resources of the web that can't be accessed by web sites and browsers alone. With a small, downloadable piece of Java code, users can coordinate and share information with each other more directly than through traditional means. To highlight the potential of the OpenKnowledge system, researchers have put it to work in three different areas: healthcare services, emergency management, and proteomics research.

Since its launch, Google's new web browser, Google Chrome, has been applauded for its lightweight look and feel and for the speed of its JavaScript engine. Although the browser still lacks support for things like RSS and browser add-ons, the company has already ripped off the beta label, a move that was probably made in preparation for Google's upcoming bundling deals with PC manufacturers.

Today, Microsoft released an alpha version of its own open source content management system, Oxite. The source code for the software is available under the Microsoft Public License. While Microsoft mostly describes Oxite as a blogging platform, the Oxite team also points out that you could use it as a content management system to develop more or less any type of site. Oxite currently powers Microsoft's own Mix Online and also uses some recycled parts from Channel 9 .

Dimdim, the easy-to-use web conferencing tool that delivers live presentations, whiteboards, voice and video, has just exited their beta period today. With the exit, the service has also added features like co-browsing and their new SynchroLive Communication Platform which automatically scales performance. The feature which you might be the most excited about, though, is Dimdim's decision to release their source code.